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EARTHQUAKE! Rare Tremors in Northeast Shake Up Twitter

So, I just moved into a new apartment in Denver. This weekend my other half and I went to the new IKEA out here and bought a bunch of bookshelves. He started building them on Monday and by Tuesday we were erecting them and loading them up with books. I noticed some extra parts he hadn’t used, and he said they were brackets to attach the shelves to the wall at the top.

An unusual swarm of temblors in southern Colorado accompanied the state's strongest earthquake in more than 40 years, shaking bricks and stones loose from buildings and rattling some residents.

"The whole house shook, the bookshelves, the paintings," said Melissa Mestas, a barista at the What'a Grind Coffee House in Trinidad. "It was really scary and just this helpless feeling."

Double yikes! It wasn’t too long after that that I got an email from Larry in Boston with the subject line “earthquake” and the body “you just missed it!” Then Laura IM’ed me to say, “There was just an earthquake here. Seriously.” So at this point, I’m thinking some combination of:

The earthquake in Japan was obviously a much bigger deal than the puny Virginia quake, so much of the talk on Twitter was decidedly tinged with sarcasm. For example, this Posterous post was one of the most shared items:

Similarly, BuzzFeed shared “20 stunning photos” of the not-so-extensive damage caused by the earthquake, including images of toys toppled sideways on countertops.